Monthly Archives: February 2016

Landing pages are often the first medium of interaction with potential leads and are instrumental in lead generation process. Good landing pages entice potential visitors, deliver what they want, collect their details, and establish thought leadership in your niche. There are other reasons why you need landing pages along with an existing website.

What are they?

Landing pages give you the flexibility to experiment with design, messages, offers and discounts, call-to-action phrases, optimizing to targeted occasions and seasons unlike homepages or internal pages of your corporate website, where you need to maintain consistency. After all, can you alter webpages to mirror the look and feel of your social or online banner ads? That’s why you need landing pages as they can be tailored to your ads and deliver solutions to visitors that they came looking for by clicking on ads.

Designing a landing page that converts usually takes a lot of considerations, experiments, A/B testing, analysis, and consistent trial and error exercises until you know you are on the right track. However, this following checklist of 5 design essentials can help you cut short the long-drawn procedures and build landing pages which will bring leads to your business.

1. Landing page form elements –

The key to get visitors sign up and get information is to keep forms minimal. Pages that throw several questions in the face of visitors on sign-up forms often dissuade them from filling up forms, despite a good content or offer in place. Follow these best practices of landing page form design:

Less is more – so, emphasize on and limit to how much users’ information you actually need. Do not overwhelm your visitors with too many questions.

To facilitate them in revealing more information, you can ease their tasks of input by including checkboxes, drop-down menu, or radio buttons with readily available options to choose from – the lesser they have to type, the more you can encourage them in filling up forms.

Also, consider selecting the right-alignment for field labels to ensure better readability.

2. Great offers –

The offers on your landing pages must be the most sought after materials and must be more than what your webpages offer. After all, it’s the promise of the type and quality of offers that drive traffic to your landing pages and it’s the deal that gets you visitors sign up for you and share information you need. Offers that mostly work a great deal in filling up web forms are whitepapers, e-books, free demo, free trial at home, free consultancy, infographic and other content that your leads are mostly browsing online.

3. Compelling call-to-action –

Give your visitors ideas on what they are going to download with a combination of compelling call-to-action (CTA) phrase and the snapshot of the downloadable content. Your visitors will know what they will get after signing up on landing pages – thus, you can increase the odds of signup and conversion.

Though there is no such definitions of call-to-action phrases that will win you more conversions, but following tricks will be handy to avoid common CTA blunders –

Straight to the point – Simple, easy to follow and clear instructions will get you more clicks compared to complex CTA instructions that often confuse or annoy your visitors. When they don’t know where to click and what to do, they leave your page without taking any action.

Make it noticed at the first glance – In addition to clear instructions, you need to go an extra mile to make it accentuated and stand out. You can simply choose a slightly larger font size, experiment with different colors, images or graphics to make it noticeable – impossible to miss out.

Leverage social media – Link your social media profiles/pages to the call-to-action phrases to encourage them to engage with you on social media. Make sure you give them something extra for liking or following your page, such as an offer they cannot resist. Once they start following your social accounts, you can follow them up for social ad campaigns.

Get CTA in both image and text – Many email clients disable image displays and also, images often don’t get loaded owing to network glitches and for other reasons. Hence, make sure a textual call-to-action phrase cohabits with visual ones to prevent risks of losing conversions.

Some more CTA hacks: keep it short, simple and not more than four to five words. Remember, you are giving clear instructions, not bossing around – so, refrain from making your CTA sound as if you are ordering them.

4. Mobile optimization –

While you are running A/B tests on your landing page, make sure you have tested and your page looks great on smartphones and tablets. With greater rate of content consumption through mobile devices over desktops and laptops, you surely do not want to miss readers accessing your page on their smartphones and tablets. Test your landing page to sidestep major blunders such as, distorted looks, loaded with missed elements, call to action or significant buttons which lead to high bounce rates.

If you are not applying responsive web design (which create pages optimized to varying screen sizes of desktop and mobile devices), then try these: your landing page design must include larger and easier-to-tap buttons and there is nothing is ‘above the fold’ since you are unaware of where the fold will lie on different screen real-estates.

5. Your credibility –

When it comes to branding and promoting, slight, informative bragging will not annoy your readers for sure. Rather, you must establish credibility in your marketto make it easier for your leads to trust you. That’s why you need to elucidate a few pointers supported by actual data such as, existing clients’ logos, their testimonials, ratings from trusted organizations e.g., BBB rating (Better Business Bureau), awards and achievements won, industry standard badges, site security badges, inclusion of your business in major listings and other significant industry recognitions.

Try these above mentioned tricks in building your landing pages in ways that improve the responsiveness and productivity of your landing pages for the next marketing campaign. At the same time, continue monitoring and measuring traffic, clicks, engagement, bounce rates and signup data to find out what content and design click among your audience and which landing page converts more. And yes, don’t forget to share your views, opinions and queries with us – we are all ears for you!

Oops! Marketo did it once again as it recently broke the news of its ‘Winter 2016 Release Notes’ on February 5, 2016. With a host of improved and new features under its wing, Marketo will be sure to entice marketers especially who were wishing for new browser support, email clients, enhancements in mobile marketing and social media marketing, improved scheduling and many more advancements.

The 5 most prominent reasons why Marketo is geared to win and churn new consumers are –

1. ‘Head Start’ of Email Programs

With this new feature update, Marketo will enable users to select a specific time for any email program and process the email program, well in advance of before the stipulated time. Once users select their email program from ‘Marketing Activities’, they can simply access this new feature called ‘Head Start’ from the ‘Schedule’ tile. When this feature will be enabled, the email program will commence about 12 hours in advance. Users must remember that once the problem starts, it will be locked including the unsubscribing functionalities. Hence, users will need to tweak their unsubscribing feature because it will take one to two business days once the program is locked.

2. Better Mobile marketing

With this Winter 2016 Release Notes, Marketo will start offering improved mobile app integration benefits. Users can integrate their mobile apps to take advantage of sending push notifications to their mobile app consumers. For this, users need to access ‘Mobile Apps & Devices’ from ‘Admin’, assign a name to the new mobile app, and configure their mobile app, whether Android or iOS for push notifications.

3. REST APIs

One big improvement of Marketo Winter 2016 Release Notes is REST API which will enable users to use Program Objects for different assets including Smart Campaigns, Tokens, Forms, Emails, manage and measure statuses on lead lifecycles through Program Membership. The APIs will also come handy in getting statuses on multiple leads by program IDs. The asset types that get full access by REST APIs include Emails, Smart Lists, Forms, Tokens, and Push Notifications. The assets that are partially supported are Smart Campaigns, Static Lists and Email Programs.

4. Facebook Ads

Another major improvement presented by Marketo Winter 2016 Release Notes include Facebook Lead ads which will offer better opportunities to run lead generation ad campaigns through Facebook. This new improved Facebook integration with Marketo will enable users to capture Facebook lead ads and trigger new follow up actions and notifications based on the information provided by leads on Facebook fill out forms.

5. Marketo Custom objects

Marketo has rolled out anew enhancement which will allow marketers use custom objects to monitor their business-centric metrics, which will come handy in any kind of marketing campaigns whether that is focused in automobile industry or online training industry. This new feature update will allow users create custom objects in both ways – either in one-to-many structure or many-to-many structure or create an intermediary object.
Other noteworthy improvements Marketo heralded with this latest release notes include syncing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, anonymous filter, support for Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Outlook 2016, real-time modification of content of marketing campaigns and many more. Do these new set of improvements benefit in your marketing efforts – share what you want from Marketo platform.